Plants in His Pack is the story of Edward Palmer, a long-forgotten scientific collector who devoted his entire life to gathering the wondrous plants, animals, birds, and Indian artifacts from the wild frontiers of the American West and Mexico. By canal boat, stagecoach, muleback, and finally railroad, he traveled on his endless quest for new and different plants. Neither hostile Indians nor the hardships of the open trail deterred this lone explorer during his sixty long years of field work in some of the wildest spots on this continent. He spent the Civil War years as an army doctor in the West, combating arrow wounds and malaria, but gathering plants whenever his ambulance wagon chanced to stop. Later he worked among the Kiowas, Comanches, Wichitas, and Apaches, bringing back sheaves of information about their strange customs. He was the first scientist to explore remote Guadalupe Island off Lower California and to dig into the ancient Indian ruins of Utah and Arizona. He alone collected more than 100,000 different plants for museums and universities in America and Europe. Yet after his death in 1911 he was all but forgotten, and only a quirk of fate finally brought his remarkable career to light.

Plants in His Pack is the compelling biography of a remarkable man who in the pursuit of scientific knowledge lived the adventurous life of the American pioneer.

From the dust jacket